Poker online: Taking Advantage of Freeroll Tournaments

I have found that playing freeroll poker tournaments can add to your bankroll quickly, and recommend everyone to take full advantage of them. Most every online poker room on the net has them as a way to keep players coming back every day. Beware though, the number of players in such tournaments can get quite large on some of the bigger rooms like PokerStars, and the play can be pretty wild in the early stages. In comparison, at the smaller rooms like Carbon Poker the number of players are much smaller.

I warn beginners to just sit tight in the freerolls and play nothing but premium hands till the later stages of the game. At the early stages you are going to run across a lot of “donks” (players that gamble on any hand) that will risk all their chips to try and double up rly. Don’t let yourself get too concerned with them, those are the players that are usually some of the first ones out. I’ve even thrown away some right strong poker hands just so I’d be playing poker in the later rounds. (one player I know even sits out the first thirty minutes of Freerolls).

In a normal tournament, people will respect your bets and raises a lot more than in a freeroll. Since the players have not paid a buy-in fee and in a lot of cases are not experienced, they will often “get married to their hand” . Say they get Q-Q pre-flop and even though the flop comes A-K-2, they will just not believe a player can possibly have them beat. Those queens just look to good to fold! The way to abuse this is to make large bets when you know you have the best hand, since they are going to call you anyway.

The value of top hands like aces or kings goes way up because you are so likely to get paid off with them….